Inhabitat: Here’s a source for gift wrap paper that is as beautiful as it is eco-conscious. Known as The Local Paper, these couture coverings are based on unique themes that are inspired by the designers’ travel, nature, and life. Each elegant wrap comes in 24×36 inch sheets that are Forestry Stewardship Council certified, made with papers that are 30% recycled post-consumer fiber. Additionally, all of the packaging used is recycled, recyclable, and biodegradable. You can purchase The Local Paper at the Contemporary Arts Museum Shop in Houston, TX or online.

The Local Paper Makes Gorgeous Eco Gift Wrap [Inhabitat]

Iconoculture: It’s hard to speak pretentiously about terroir with secret sauce dripping down your chin. Los Angeles-based Learn About Wine’s Blind Date tastings pair a variety of respectable reds with beloved In-N-Out Double-Double cheeseburgers.

The tastings are held on assorted Friday nights in a downtown loft and boast 20 one-ounce blind pours. Each night of the series features a different red: merlot, cab, zinfandel, pinot noir and Rhone. Afterwards the wines are revealed so that tasters can ensure they pair the right bottle with their next combo meal.

But you can’t get fries with that — wine tasting has to retain some level of class!

Californians, with their own lively vinoculture, know that wine is not just for snobs, and most oenophiles know the scene at the end of the movie Sideways speaks the truth: Wine goes with just about anything, including a hamburger.

Wine tasting gone wild: Pairings for the drive-thru set [Iconoculture]

Springwise: Each month, Reknit will unravel old sweaters and re-knit them into a different item; this January, it's scarves. Consumers begin by choosing from two different scarf styles—each priced at USD 30—and sending their old sweaters to Boston-based Reknit. Then, “my mom will turn your old sweater into a new scarf,” as the site's creator explains it. Visitors to the site even get to vote on which type of items “mom” will convert sweaters into next month: a beanie, an iPod case, cut-off gloves or socks. (Spoiler alert: the cut-off gloves are currently in the lead.)

More upcycling: sweaters into scarves [Springwise]

Hurriyet Daily News: Saadet Erciyas, a female entrepreneur from İzmir, and her team are creating decorative products by using the marbling art on Turkish natural stone. As part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture events, she is preparing to display her products and sell them in museum stores. Her next goal is to market them around the world.

According to Erciyas, the natural stones on which they work include travertine from the Aegean city of Denizli, marble from Afyon in western Turkey and limestone from the Mediterranean city of Antalya. “We bring stone together with marbling art and make decorative products for the house. We create frames, paintings, coat hangers and plaques,” she said. “We apply flower designs, which are traditional designs in marbling art, such as tulips, daisies, violets and roses to the stone. We also pay attention so that the colors do not hide the texture of the natural stone.”

Aesthetic Marble is working with five female marbling artists, Erciyas said. “Each product we produce is the only one. This is unique to marbling art,” she added. “You can get only one product from the marble tray at one time. No product is the same as another – you can find a similar one, but not the same. The fact that the products are unique makes you enjoy them more.”

The entrepreneur said she and her team have received orders from boutique hotels, stone houses and the construction sector during the fairs they have participated in. “We are working on them,” she said. “Our products will be used as decoration on walls of mosques, caravanserai or boutique hotels.”

Natural stone blossoms with marbling art [Hurriyet Daily News]

HP's Store in Store is, as its name suggests, a mini HP island within a larger retail outlet, offering customers the opportunity to learn, engage and experience an entire spectrum of the latest HP technology; from personal computing to imaging and printing products. It is, like an island, independent and exclusive to its own products, associates and atmosphere.

HP Middle East to pioneer interactive shopping experience [AMEinfo.com]

Square Payment

Square is a mobile app that lets you start accepting payment cards immediately with no contracts, monthly fees, or hidden costs. With Square, you can read payment cards from any device with an audio input jack....

Continued in BIZNESS! Newsletter Issue 97 >>>

- Self Cleaning Coffee Table
- ‘You and Me’ Clock
- Ritmo: iPod for Babies
- Handy Innovation
- Cool Water
- MacBook in Old Leather
- Get a To-Do Tattoo

Continue reading these top stories in the BIZNESS! Newsletter >>>

- How To Shorten Your Sales Cycle & Win More Clients, Faster!
- Hiring a Winning Team: How Three Types of Women Entrepreneurs Put it Together
- Tools To Monitor Your Online Reputation
- 7 Print Newsletter Design Tips to Get Your Client Newsletter Opened & Read Every Time
- From $100K+ Executive to Entrepreneur: 7 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Become an Entrepreneur
- Should the Print Newsletter Die - And Let Ezines Takeover?
- Start an Online Business from Home or School

Continue reading these top stories in the BIZNESS! Newsletter >>>

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Inc.: Other Lab founder Saul Griffiths has made a fortune applying way-out mathematics to inventions large and small, including robotic kites, insulation inspired by origami, and the carbon-emissions calculator WattzOn.

Other Lab is not an easy business to define. You might call it an incubator, though Griffith avoids the term because of the stink it obtained during the dot-com boom and bust (that is, as a place where investment capital is wasted on foosball tables and projects that go nowhere). You might call it the lair of a mad scientist. Essentially, it is a workshop in which inventions are launched and tested in the hopes that they become products that either will be sold off or will grow into companies.

Saul Griffith's House of Cool Ideas [Inc.]

CoolHunting: Eliminating waste in more ways than one, Method's powerful new laundry detergent makes washing "smarter, easier and greener" with its "smartclean" technology and precise pump.

With its extremely concentrated patent-pending formula, Method packs enough suds into one small package to clean 50 loads of laundry. Requiring just four squirts, the ingenious pump delivers an easy way to always add a consistently accurate amount while eliminating the messy drip that usually happens with traditional spout design.

Method Laundry Detergent [CoolHunting]

Short term memory? Trying getting this temp tattoo. The To-Do Tattoo kit includes 12 graphic “To Do” forms that you can apply to your body wherever it’s most convenient (or creative) and a skin-safe, washable-ink gel pen. You’ll never again have to make lame excuses for missing bowling night or your mom’s birthday.

SmartyRents offer a variety of educational video games for children from the ages of 9 months to 10 years. The "Netflix" of educational games has several rental packages available to allow you to find the best package to fit the needs of your family. Maybe you have several children at different age levels or with different game systems and need an option to rent more than one game at a time; just pick a suitable game in the large inventory of titles and SmartyRents will send that must-have title directly to your door.

Eve of Destruction [TrendCentral]

CrunchGear: Here’s something that’s custom and unique for protecting your Mac Book – the BookBook. Based on the concept of hiding in plain sight, the BookBook case resembles an antique leather-bound book.

Of course, the BookBook is hand-distressed, but instead of it happening over years, it happens rather quickly in order to make it a marketable product. Still, once the cover is zipped closed it pretty much looks like a book. The zipper pulls are intentionally designed to look like a bookmark, and once closed, to the causal observer it looks just like a book.

BookBook wraps your Macbook in old leather [CrunchGear]

Do you get your best ideas and inspiration in the shower? Do you lose those great ideas before you can get out and write them down?

AquaNotes is a completely waterproof notepad that allows you to record your great ideas while you're in the shower. Water simply beads up and rolls-off this waterproof paper.

Cool Tools: Perplexus is a cool 3-dimensional maze that is easy to get started and hard to finish. You need to steer a small metal ball along an ingenious obstacle course by rotating the clear plastic globe. There are 100 stations along the way, including some difficult topsy-turvy turns. All ages can get into it. We've found the puzzle to be extremely addictive to anyone who gets started. Because it's like a 3D video game without the electronics, the very physical nature of playing -- turning it this way and that -- is very satisfying. In addition, the maze is like a sculpture, the design of the route is geekily brilliant, and the elegance of the eternal return of the steel ball within the sphere is a stroke of genius. Perplexus has the glow of a work of art. It makes me happy just to pick it up.

Perplexus [Cool Tools]

The Gazette: Manuel Desrochers didn't set out to design an award-winning piece of utilitarian sculpture.

"I'm not even a designer," is the first thing Desrochers, the 34-year-old Montreal creator of the Ovopur water-filtration unit, says about himself.

"But I've always been preoccupied by water and how underappreciated it is in our society. We open the tap and let it pour, or we buy it in plastic bottles and then throw them away.

"In our society, water is taken for granted or hidden away."

It's that sentiment that prompted him to come up with an eco-friendly water-filtration system for the home or office that is at once functional, environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing. His Ovopur, which retails for about $690, is an egg-shaped water-filtration system of handmade porcelain and mouthblown glass that filters tap water through a reusable glass filter and keeps it cool without electricity.

The water trickles down from an upper reservoir, through a glass filter containing four layers of filtering materials, and into an 11-litre egg-shaped porcelain reservoir whose thermal properties keep the water cool.

Cool water [The Gazette]